Few contemporary visitors to Asbury Park would ever
suspect the town originated as a religious resort. Across the bridge
over Wesley Lake, a neon sign atop a tall office building advertises
"liquors." The building stands just down the street from Palace
Amusements, now abandoned, lacking the "P," and facing empty parking
lots. But Asbury Park's illustrious past lives on in history, song, and
memory. The area just north of Ocean Grove was developed in 1871, and by
1878 Harper's Weekly described both resorts in a single article.
(Fig. 49 & 50)

Our readers will notice that the central sketch gives
equal prominence to Ocean Grove and Asbury Park. The latter enterprise
owes its inception to the energy of a single individual, Mr. James A.
Bradley. Asbury Park soon grew into a populous summer city. At present,
it has two church edifices, hotels, boardinghouses, stores of every
variety necessary, a weekly paper, a post office, a public hail and in
the centre of the Park, Educational Hall. [27]

Figure 49. Ocean Grove and Wesley Lake. Methot Up and Down the
Beach

Figure 50. Asbury Park, Methot Up and Down the Beach.

Bradley, a New York brush manufacturer, hoped his
resort would instill religious principles and encourage temperate moral
living. He named the town after a human embodiment of such ideals,
Francis Asbury, the first Methodist bishop in America. An Ocean Grove
camp meeting vacation inspired Bradley to purchase 500 acres for
$90,000, supposedly in an effort to keep the land from those less
religiously inclined. Insuring that "no bad influences might encroach on
the adjoining camp meeting," Bradley wrote restrictions against alcohol
into Asbury Park property deeds. While Ocean Grove maintained its rather
self-righteous demeanor, Asbury Park rebelled against its religious
upbringing, quickly becoming a successful secular enterprise that
brought a new liveliness to the north Jersey seashore (Fig. 51).
"Stimulated by the fiery influence of ice-cream and ginger-pop, its
permanent and floating population may plunge into the vortex of social
dissipation afforded by pool, billiards, bowling, smoking and dancing,"
Kobbe reported. [28]

A row of lumberyards along the New Jersey and Long
Branch Railroad tracks at Asbury Park in 1878 attests to the building
boom that swiftly saw dozens of wood-frame hotels, boarding and guest
houses erected along the broad avenues leading to the Atlantic beaches.
The Grand Avenue, Coleman, and Lakeview House were among the rambling
hostelries pictured in Woolman & Rose's 1878 Historical and
Biographical Atlas of the New Jersey Coast. [29] By 1889, the town was well-equipped for
summer crowds with a one-mile-long plank boardwalk lit up at night, a
lecture hall from the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that
accommodated 1,500 persons, and about 200 hotels, some open throughout
the year. [30] After describing the
extensive civic amenities, including wide streets, pure water, and an
excellent drainage system, Kobbe remarked, "In time Asbury Park may
become a winter as well as a summer resort, a remark which applies to
all the resorts along the coast." [31]

By 1890, Asbury Park was one of the shore's popular
resorts, its population of 4,000 permanent residents hosting 26,000
summer visitors. [32] The religious Bradley
may have inadvertently increased Asbury Park's secular popularity when,
as a member of the New Jersey legislature, he arranged passage of a bill
banning betting. The new law closed down Long Branch's popular Monmouth
Park race track and left Asbury Park with much of the resort's wealthy
clientele. [33]

Away from the ocean, along Cookman Avenue, a business
district gradually grew to become the major retail and commercial hub of
Monmouth County, a role it would play until the advent of shopping malls
well into the 1960s. By the 1870s, stores here sold stoves, newspapers,
pumps, meat, fruit, candy, and tobacco. [34]
In 1887, New Jersey's first electric trolley and America's second was
operating along Asbury Park streets. [35] A
decade later shoppers had such easy access up and down the shore that
the Steinbach Brothers confidently built a multi-story, brick and stone,
department store (Fig. 52)a scaled-down, seaside version of the
great emporiums John Wanamaker and R.H. Macy had built in Philadelphia
and New York. For years Steinbach's flyers proclaimed it "the world's
largest resort department store."

By the early twentieth century, Kobbe's prediction
had long since become a reality. The temperance advocate's ideals were
forgotten in a scramble to develop the area into a substantial city from
the revenues of a hardy tourist trade. Hotel advertising and the city's
promotional booklets continued to depict a Victorian seaside resort.
Trees had matured along streets where many year-round residents occupied
well-proportioned foursquare and Colonial Revival houses. As early as
1910, the city's mayor predicted a new "airship" link to New York, [36] and the following year, the city fought for
the right to permit trains to stop at the station on Sundays.

Construction of the monumental pseudo-Spanish-style
Monterey Hotel along the boardwalk in 1912 foretold of a new resort on a
larger, more flamboyant scale. However, it was James Bradley's death in
1921 that released land for redevelopment and enabled the city to grow
dramatically. In 1926, the brick Colonial Revival Berkeley Carteret
Hotel opened as a year-round business. Vacationers to Asbury Park in the
1920s strolled along a crowded boardwalk lined with shops and anchored
by two impressive secular buildingsa festive casino and an elegant
convention hallwhich were heated in winter by the mausoleum-like
central plant that sits at the foot of Wesley Lake.

Island Heights

Like Ocean Grove, Island Heights was named for
geographical features that Methodist ministers found attractive in a
camp meeting site. Situated at the mouth of Toms River, with a view of
the bay from the highest point on the shore south of Highlands, Island
Heights has a long history as a choice "camping" spot. Indians spent
their summers in the area hundreds of years before the Methodists
arrived. One local legend claims the river is named for Indian Tom, who
settled on the bluffs of Island Heights. The property was known as Dr.
Johnson's Island in the seventeenth century and Dillon's Island in the
eighteenth, until a serious storm closed Cranberry inlet and left the
northern channel part of the mainland.

Nineteenth-century development began when the
Reverend Jacob Graw established the Island Heights Association, a group
of twelve members of the New Jersey Conference of the Methodist
Episcopal Church and seventeen businessmen. The association incorporated
and purchased the property in July 1878. According to his son, "Dr. Graw
did not undertake to establish a second Ocean Grove. That was impossible
then and now. But he did undertake to build up a Christian family resort
under temperance influences with the camp meeting as a special feature."
[37] The association immediately began
constructing the camp meeting grounds, roads, and docks, placing the
auditorium in a clearing on the steep bluffs overlooking the water.
Before the first gathering that August, "underbrush was removed from
about ten acres; two avenues partly opened; a pavilion built; seats
arranged for camp ground; thirty camp meeting cottages erected; and a
hotel commenced." [38] Within five years,
the new resort was connected with the Camden to Seaside Park line by a
branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Because the settlement grew from a carefully
thought-out urban plan corresponding to the landscape, two distinct
sections were created. Serpentine roads, like Camp Walk, crossed the
eastern riverfront property, while the western end was blocked out in a
regular grid. Small camp meeting cottages were built around the meeting
ground or "tenting" area bounded by Simpson and Laurel avenues. Camp
Meeting Walk encircles the site of the auditorium, now a playground with
a view of the river through the pines. An original cottage (Fig. 53),
No. 129, still stands on the west side of the street. [39] Larger Victorian houses decked out in
gingerbread and Shingle-style "villas" were built along River Avenue
facing the water. In 1890, Philadelphia architect Henry Petit designed
Arbutus Lodge, his own Queen Anne home at 60 River Avenue.

During the early years of settlement, the riverfront
was developed to accommodate summer guests. A wharf provided space for
yachts and hacks chartered by visitors and a 16' x 30' building was
constructed to house the association's administration headquarters, a
store, and rooms for visiting ministers. [40] The yacht club and pavilion (Fig. 54),
constructed early in the twentieth century, still provide a focal point
for riverfront gatherings. The commercial district developed along
Central Avenue, extending inland from a riverfront pavilion that served
as a dock and community center. A variety of small businesses, the 1890
Tudor ice cream parlor, the old Island Heights movie house, and a
Classical Revival drugstore, line the historic road.

Figure 54. Yacht Club, Island Heights. HABS No. NJ-OC-10.1 Ames.

Though still a dry town, Island Heights grew out of
its religious roots into a popular family resort. By the early 1920s,
the borough offered all the latest modern conveniences within a scenic
location free from noisy seaside amusements. A promotional pamphlet
published by the local board of trade boasts of Island Height's
"splendid roads, concrete sidewalks, boardwalk, electric lights and gas,
splendid supply of excellent water for domestic use, sewer system" and
"more public docks than any other community in the state." [41] Perhaps because of its quiet setting, the
city attracted artists; the painter John Frederick Peto first came to
Island Heights in summer 1889 and played the coronet at a Methodist camp
meeting. Many years later, Peto returned to build his studio at 102
Cedar Avenue. One of his paintings, which still hangs in his studio,
depicts a letter addressed to his daughter in Island Heights. Describing
the resort in their promotional guide of 1920, the central committee of
the Barnegat Bay Board of Trade emphasized Island Height's exclusive
population sequestered in the pines overlooking the water.

The first day here you'll write back home that you've
discovered the Ideal Spot. Every condition is favorable to rest and
enjoyment, health, convenience and economy. The masses know nothing of
the wonders of Barnegat Bay, and it is for the purpose of keeping the
summer colony as select as possible that instead of heralding our fame
through the press of the country we have compiled this booklet and mail
it to those whom we care to reach. [42]

Even today, without the religious influence, Island
Heights retains an aura of privacy and spiritual peace. Naturally
protected from the traffic along Route 9 and the Garden State Parkway,
the city offers a sense of what late nineteenth-century resorts might
have been like.

Ocean City

When four Methodist ministers chose Peck's Beach as
the site of a camp meeting settlement, the island on the upper coast of
Cape May County was an almost untouched wilderness. According to legend,
William Burrell and Ezra B., James E., and S. Wesley Lake made a
covenant establishing the city on September 10, 1879, near what would
become the "Ocean City Tabernacle grounds." The newly formed Ocean City
Association began building almost immediately after purchasing a
500-acre parcel of the island from John Somers the following year.
Agreeing that the "Grove Association" form of land ownership adopted at
Ocean Grove was unsuitable for rapid development, Ocean City founders
accepted private investments dictated by a set of stringent moral rules.
Those abusing the privileges established by the association were forced
to give up their land to the governing body.

Like Ocean Grove, however, Ocean City was planned
around a large tree-filled campground area, and the streets formed a
grid pattern of standardized rectangular lots. By the end of 1881, more
than 500 building lots had been sold. [43]
Just a year after the city's incorporation, a ninety-five-room hotel was
built on Ocean and 7th Street, overlooking the smaller stores and homes
already lining the beachfront. Pieces of the Brighton were shipped to
the island and assembled on the site 600 yards from the water. [44]

The hotel owners must have anticipated business from
the Pleasantville and Ocean City Railroad, which began running between
Pleasantville and Somer's Point in 1881. Visitors traveled to Ocean City
on the Atlantic Coast Steamboat Company's ferrys until 1884, when a
turnpike and connecting bridges were built from Beesley's Point. [45] Early growth centered around the
auditorium, later known as the Tabernacle, built in 1881 between Fifth
and Sixth streets and Asbury and Wesley avenues. Even before the
permanent wood-frame building was completed, the first meeting drew
about 1,000 participants who camped in tents on the future Tabernacle
site. [46] The Rev. William W. Wood's 1880
report, as president of the Ocean City Association, anticipated a series
of social events that would enhance the camp's religious reputation.
"Besides the regular services of the encampment, there will be
temperance conventions, anniversaries, and other Christian and
philanthropic convocations, fully occupying the season, and making it
memorable in interest and profit." [47] That
the venture did become popular, as well as profitable, is illustrated by
the National Temperance Camp Meeting held there the next year and the
association's sponsorship of one- and two-room cottages. Examples of
these "association houses" or "salt boxes" still exist on the island.
[48] The tabernacle continues to host
nationally prominent preachers of various denominations in a 1957 modern
brick building on the original site. [49]

Two of the ministers involved in the establishment of
Ocean City, James E. and S. Wesley Lake, were also responsible for the
founding of a camp meeting in Monmouth County. They chose Portland
Point, a failed speculative development, for the site of the new
Methodist Atlantic Highlands Camp Meeting, which grew up around the
traditional "sylvan amphitheater" and "octagonal tabernacle." [50] Although the group financed the Grand View
Hotel and sold property lots, the camp meeting's hegemony had diminished
by 1886 and development continued as a secular vacation city.

The history of the Atlantic Highland's religious
resort, where one could absorb "a wholesome atmosphere of temperance and
"a moral and Christian sentiment," was barely mentioned in the 1922
History of Monmouth County. [51] This
historical account emphasized the city's location, "nearest to New York
of the shore resorts of New Jersey" and "ideal in every respect."
Features of the city enjoyed by visitors of all religious persuasions
include sea breezes, fishing, bathing, "faultless" roads, and "a marine
view not excelled in America (Fig. 55)." [52]

Even during its religious years, Atlantic Highlands
was a significant Monmouth County port. In 1883, the New Jersey Central
Railroad abandoned its pier on federal land at Sandy Hook and
re-established it at Atlantic Highlands. The town became the transfer
point between ship and train for tourists coming from New York. The huge
piers, once linked to the shore by webs of curving rails, allowed trains
to go right out onto the dock. [53] The
piers are gone now, but a commuter boatalthough no match in luxury
for yesterday's sidewheelersstill operates from one pier to
Manhattan.

Atlantic Highlands' downtown is not quite the busy
business and retail center it was in the nineteenth century, when its
landmarks included such scaled-down interpretations of Richardsonian
Romanesque as its 1885 National Bank. The structures that survive, such
as the thriving hardware store and the vintage stainless-steel White
Crystal Diner (Fig. 56), reflect the twentieth century. The 1930s WPA
New Jersey: A Guide to its Present and Past recommended Atlantic
Highlands for the "Scenic Drive, climbing sharply and passing old
Victorian houses with the towers, turrets, bay windows, hidden porches,
irregular contours, and baroque decoration popular in the nineteenth
century." [54] Today, high-style Post Modern
homes appear on this bluff road alongside a few remaining Victorians and
innumerable Colonial Revivals of every era. With its leafy streets and
sharp, steep turns characteristic of the pre-automobile era, Atlantic
Highlands has retained favor with the wealthy.

In 1875, the small Presbyterian community of Sea
Grove was established on the southern tip of New Jersey. Three years
later, the community was renamed Cape May Point. The religious resort
was founded by Alexander Whilldon, a successful Philadelphia wool
merchant who sold his inherited land to the Sea Grove Association after
it was chartered by the state legislature. The original board of
directorsAlexander Whilldon, Dr. V.M.D. Marcy, Hon. Downs Edmonds,
J. Newton Walker, and John Wanamakeraspired to "furnish a
religious and moral seaside home, for the glory of God and the welfare
of man, where the latter may be refreshed and invigorated, body and
soul, and better fitted for the highest and noblest duties of life." [55]

With Wanamaker's encouragement and financial support,
Whilldon supervised the association in establishing and marketing city
lots, and in 1875, the construction of a pavilion in the center of the
village. Encircled by Pavilion Avenue, it was an open octagonal
structure, 100' in diameter, and is said to have held 15,000 people. [56] An 1876 plan of Sea Grove (Fig. 57),
designed by the office of Philadelphia architect J.C. Sidney, shows wide
boulevards radiating from this central hub where community religious
services were held.

Soon after Sea Grove's founding, three hotels and a
few private dwellings were erected. The largest hotel was the Sea Grove
House, which stood in the block bounded by Beach, Cape and Lincoln
avenues, and Sure Street. Two other hotels, the Union House and the Cape
House, were both located on Cape Avenue. Carefully surveyed and numbered
lots covered the land between the Sea Grove House and Pavilion and the
area stretching from Lake Lily to the Delaware Bay and the Atlantic
Ocean. In an attempt to attract a summer population, the association
provided clergymen with $500 lots. By 1876, a substantial number of
dwellings had been built, mostly concentrated in the southwest section
of town between the pavilion and the beach. [57] Along with the purchase of cottages, new
residents were given free passes on the West Jersey Railroad.

In 1878, under the new name Cape May Point, the
community attracted a variety of visitors. A seaside "home" was founded
for underprivileged children and their parents. John D. Lankenau, patron
of the Lankenau Hospital in Philadelphia, provided a house to
accommodate nurses and hospital employees. St. Peter's-by-the-Sea
Episcopal Church (Fig. 58), originally built in 1876 for the Centennial
Exhibition, was purchased and moved to Cape May Point in 1879. It has
since been moved several more times, in retreat from the receding
shoreline, and now stands on Lake Drive. [58] In 1890, a camp meeting for the United
Brethren of Christ was formed at Cape May Point (Fig. 59). Though small,
it apparently was successful, since the property was not split up and
sold until 1935. [59]

Quite a few cottages dating from the third quarter of
the nineteenth century still stand in Cape May Point. One noteworthy
example is the vacation home of department store magnate John Wanamaker
(1838-1922). Reportedly, President Benjamin Harrison and his wife were
entertained by then Postmaster General Wanamaker in Cape May Point
around 1889. The Harrisons were said to have enjoyed their stay so much
that a group of friends raised $10,000 and erected a twenty-room house
for them. The Harrisons spent the summers of 1890 and 1891 there, but
the property was abandoned after Mrs. Harrison died. It was purchased by
the Wanamaker family in 1909. [60]

Prior to the Sea Grove Association, the lighthouse at
Cape May Point was the only standing structure in the area. The present
lighthouse is the third on the site. The first, erected in 1823, was
replaced in 1847 when the original beacon "toppled into the sea." The
second structure, also threatened by the waves, was replaced in 1859 by
the present lighthouse. [61] During World
War II, the area near the lighthouse was taken over by the U.S.
Government. A concrete gun emplacement from this era now sits in the
bay.

During the early twentieth century, when the
association sold much of its land, the architectural personality of the
city began to change. Constant erosion took its toll, destroying many
cottages and relocating other structures further inland. The Shoreham
Hotel, erected in 1890, is one of the few remaining beachfront
buildings. Now a summer retreat for the Sisters of St. Joseph, the hotel
recalls the city's early religious roots, though its patrons are of a
different denomination. [62] The commercial
district consists of a single building, "the General Store." Perhaps
because of its proximity to the popular and heavily restored Cape May
City, two miles down Sunset Boulevard, the point remains relatively
undeveloped. Potential erosion might also keep prospective builders from
investing. Residents recall the days when other avenues extended beyond
Harvard, a street currently endangered by the waves. Today Cape May
Point is frequented by birds traveling the Atlantic flyway. The many
birders who flock to the point each fall rarely remain off-season, and
the town of 267 people becomes smaller every year.

Seaside Park

In 1876, the year Presbyterians were populating Sea
Grove, Baptists established a 300-acre camp on the strip of land north
of Long Beach Island. Seaside Park was originally envisioned as "a place
of rest and ease at moderate expense and free from the blighting
influences of immorality, drunkenness and Sabbath desecration." [63] Probably because of the lack of efficient
transportation routes, the resort failed to attract converts, and by the
end of the decade, the association's property was sold at a "sheriffs
auction." [64] Virtually all the property
was purchased by Thomas Kennedy, [65] who
quickly went to work laying out a grid of streets. In 1878, the Seaside
Park Hotel (Fig. 60) was completed and another, the Franklin, was under
construction. [66] Real development began
after the Philadelphia and Long Branch Railroad reached across Barnegat
Bay and north to Bay Head. New hotels included the Berkeley, which was
burned or demolished early in the twentieth century. The Hiawatha Hotel,
the Maryland pavilion at the Centennial Exposition, was partially
dismantled and floated by barge to Seaside Park. Under the new name of
Manhasset, the hotel offered "150 rooms, barber shops, laundry, pool,
shuffleboards, elevator, electric lights, artesian well water,
long-distance telephone, tennis courts, and golf." [67]

Figure 60. Seaside Park Hotel, ca. 1880. Up and Down the
Beach. Methot.

Early in the twentieth century, four fisheries were
located at Seaside Park's south end: the Seaside Park, Hiering, Spring
Lake, and United. "The fisheries were able to ship fish and other sea
produce by truck to the mainland, sometimes averaging as much as twenty
truckloads a day and often exchanging their fish for the mainland's farm
produce." [68] Charles Hankins & Sons
began building boats on Grand Central Avenue in 1912. The automobile has
since turned Seaside Park into a strip indistinguishable from the rest
of Island Beach, although it remains more residential in character than
commercial Seaside Heights.